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Preface: The Beaune Altarpiece, or “The Germination of the Resurrected”
- Fordham University Press
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xiii Preface The Beaune Altarpiece, or “The Germination of the Resurrected” The altarpiece in the Beaune hospice in Burgundy, France, says all that needs to be said, or almost all, on the subject of the “germination of the resurrected.” Art in general, or the painter Rogier Van der Weyden in this case, is able to give us the visual image of a mystery that philosophy and theology can barely represent: the Last Judgement understood as a moment of the “resurrection of the body.” I shall say nothing here, or almost nothing, of the painting overall, because the reader can easily go and see the altarpiece for himself or herself, and because the power of the image defies all attempts at conceptualization. But with the altarpiece in mind as a starting point for the present essay, I should like simply to note that the resurrected figures emerge naked from the earth itself, at the sound of the last trumpet. There is neither coffin nor tomb in this raising up, but simply an “earthly crust,” more or less fertile, broken up and transformed by the “resurrected ones” at the call of the Last Judgement. The humus— not only what engulfs us in death but also what closes all the horizon of our existence (i.e., finitude)—cracks and opens up under the upstanding resurrected. Could it be that in Christianity the resurrection of the dead is more than simply redemption from sin? Certainly the little figurines representing virtues (virtutes) and sins (peccata), on the scales of the archangel Michael, surprise us in their attitude and in their expression (the lightness of the one and the allure of the other). But they are not the essential point, despite the originality of their commentary on the problem. The specificity of the image takes its force from the birth of the resurrected, which xiv ■ Preface is greater than any literary or artistic conjecture in this strange (but how accurate) theological metamorphosis of the philosophic structure of the world. There is a cracking and opening up of immanence and temporality (the crust of our finitude), even though finitude may be impassable simply at the level of our existence as part of mankind. Neither another world nor an event in the world, the resurrection shows itself here in its own true daylight as a transformation of the world, and of human beings in the world: In Heidegerrian terms, it is an ontological and not an ontic event. For those who are resurrected, in the altarpiece as in the present work as a whole, it does not matter in what place or from what spot they spring from the earth. (In Van der Weyden’s picture, one can even be resurrected on the side of hell!) All that counts is the attitude of the body as it pulls out of the earth: turned toward God (to paradise), or turned in on itself (to hell). Could it be that the fleshly specificity of our resuscitated selves belongs more to the mode of being of our bodies than to their substance? Or could it be perhaps that our own resurrection is none other than the raising up and transfiguration of our manner of being in the world through our bodies here on earth? It is that manner of being in the world through our bodies by which we live and express our most intimate selves, so much are we, first of all, creatures of flesh and blood. In short, the altarpiece of the Master of Beaune obviously signifies more than the simple repetition of what is usually said or imagined concerning the resurrection of the body. It has inspired the author of the present essay for several years, and I hope that some of what it has inspired I can suggest to my reader. I hope to unite writer and reader, the one and the other, the one as much as the other, in the same enterprise, in the compelling necessity to say something about our resurrected being “not that it might be [completely] spoken, but that it might not be left unspoken” (St. Augustine ). We may hope thus to avoid sinking into that silence that would destroy this mystery forever. [3.84.231.140] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:27 GMT) The Metamorphosis of Finitude ...